Ancient history as commonly retold in European and American societies is pervaded by a great and deluding absence. When it suits us, we can easily turn that absence into a bogeyman and we show how easily we can absorb fears like those of the oracle of Baalbek. Understanding the ancient world and ours requires us to notice what is missing and to remember that bogeymen are creatures of children’s imaginations.
The mistake lies in thinking that east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. Even Kipling, who wrote those famous words in his Ballad of East and West, really had it just about right:
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Imperial lust for expansion
Start again with the Greeks. The old story is perfectly well known and predictable. For reasons of imperial lust for expansion, the Persians loom up out of the east and seek to conquer the Greeks, who resist them heroically and succeed in defeating them, bravely at Thermopylae, more lastingly at Salamis. Beaten once for all, the Persians slink away. They are next seen in the cameo part of villains in Xenophon’s tale of the march of the 10,000—where it is to be noticed that whatever we think of Persians beating up on Greeks, here was a case where Greeks beat up on Persians private tour istanbul.
And we approve of Greeks, because they are our ancestors and taught us all we know. “Greeks,” however, is a word that was not a natural or easy name for the people who lived, in Plato’s words, like frogs around a pond on the shores and islands of the Aegean. The story of Troy let Homeric readers begin to imagine such a category. When the Persians conquered the people of Lydia in western Asia Minor in the fifth century BCE, the people with whom the Lydians shared language and gods began to think of themselves as similarly threatened, and defined themselves back into existence as the un-Persians.
Persia always offered Greece the counterimage of itself, and much of Greek thought about religion and politics— down to the present—emerges as a way of declaring independence from powers to the east. (Nothing to the north or west of Greece was of any account, and the Egyptians were just, tantalizingly, too far away to make a real difference.) The reason for the Greeks to prevail against the Persians was not intrinsic excellence, but simply that the Persians came a little too late and found the Greeks a little too far along commercially and militarily, a little too ready to band together to resist them. Out of this accident of history a lasting opposition emerged. But there was an alternative.2 We must take a detour to understand these Persias and Persians that succeeded one another.
According to the common view
Alexander the Great, a right-minded man even if he did drink too much (according to the common view), sought to conquer all of Persia and succeeded, but he died too soon, and his conquests were lost. Few people spend much time imagining a middle-aged and successful Alexander, a man lucky enough to live as long as Augustus did, let’s say. If we knew that man, we would know him not as a Greek or Macedonian, but as a Persian emperor. That is what he set out to become, and that is how he appeared in much of the territory he crossed Another king from the western city of Epidamnos.
At his death, his armies were turning rapidly Persian in composition and form, and they would have become much more so with the passage of only a little time. His conquest would have proved what only the Ottomans ever demonstrated—that linking the Aegean basin with Asia Minor and Mesopotamia was possible and, if achieved, could have been a source of great power for the one who accomplished the bravura deed. For Alexander to be Macedonian, from the farthest reaches of territory within Persian ken, was no disqualification: conquering rulers in many societies come from the margins, at least as often as from the center.
